Paul Statt Communications

Maurice Goddard, the head of the Pennsylvania Department of Forests and Waters from 1955 until 1979, was the godfather of the State Parks system.In 1955, “Goddard took the position and set a goal of a state park within 25 miles of every resident of Pennsylvania. “We took a big map of Pennsylvania and drew circles around Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the Wyoming Valley, and Harrisburg,” he said.”Today we can improve on Goddard’s primitive geographic information system. I created a series of maps for the Pennsylvania Parks and Forests Foundation on Goddard’s theme. The first two maps I produced, using data from the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) website, concentrated on population. One showed the largest cites on Pennsylvania and its parks; the other the most populous year 2000 census tracts.

For these maps I downloaded a map of the boundaries of the state parks from the Pennsylvania Division of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), the Pennsylvania municipal boundaries, and used the census data provided by ESRI. Using a spatial query, I selected Pennsylvania cities in 25 miles proximity to a park. Every city shown is within 25 miles of a State Park. Yet because cities are few, the coverage looks sparse.Both maps clearly demonstrate that Goddard’s dream has been all but realized. But I wanted a map with more impact. The solution was to ignore the population data altogether. I went back to the PASDA data, and found shapefiles for Pennsylvania state forest lands from the DCNR, gamelands from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and even one for the “major” parks along the Appalachian Trail, from the US National Parks Service. Using buffers of 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 miles around each park, and dissolving any overlap, I came up with a simulation of a contour map, on which the parks are the “peaks” and the few parts of Pennsylvania that are far from a park are the “valleys.”

The map doesn’t actually answer the question posed by its title, “How Many Pennsylvanians Live Within 25 Miles of a State Park?” except to say, “Almost all of them!” An answer that I think Maurice Goddard would have approved.

It was revealing to create a similar map for the state forests. (I did not use the “dissolve” feature on this map, just to see how it would look.) The state forests are larger and more concentrated in the middle of the commonwealth than the parks are. There are more areas that are more than 25 miles from a state forest, and those ares are mainly in the far west of the state.

I also created a map to demonstrate that most of Pennsylvania is also within 25 miles of a “gameland,” a state property reserved for hunting, fishing and trapping. (And usually thought to be unsuited to farming or development, although gamelands are being leased now to gas extractors for development.)